VLC, the cross-platform play-everything-and-we-mean-everything video client is about to go 2.0 on the Mac. And amongst all the new features is one very welcome change: A completely re-designed interface that makes it look a lot more at home on Apple hardware than the open-source v1.x ever did.
Steve Jobs was obsessed with making the Mac run silently, even going so far as to tell Mac hardware designers to make the internal fans kick-in at a much higher temperature than contemporary PCs. It seems strange, then, that in this zen quest for quietness, the first thing that happens when you turn a Mac on is here a loud bootup chime. If you’d like to get rid of that chime and boot-up as silently as a submarine running deep, it’s easy, thanks to this cute little app.
The latest update to Alfred adds a selection of smart new features, one of which is a new way of grabbing selected text from any Mac app and pushing it straight into one of your other Alfred actions – such as a web search, for example.
Yeah, that spinning beach ball looks all happy and fun, but the diabolical critter’ll make your system slower than the line at the central Los Angeles DMV on a late Friday afternoon. Not to worry — FreeMemory is here to help.
No, the free app won’t kick the little swine out to sea — but at least it’ll let you deflate it somewhat by keeping close tabs on the status of your RAM.
Update: To spice things up a bit – we’re now going to select TWO winners for this Mac Super Bundle featuring Parallels 7 – ONE for you and ONE for a friend. Check below to see how you and your bestie can WIN!
Note: if you previously entered in the giveaway you will still be eligible to win, but if you want to give your friends a chance to win, be sure to check out the new rules below!
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Ready to Supercharge your Mac? How about doing it for FREE?!? Then you may want to check out our latest giveaway below.
Packed full of goodies our Mac SuperBundle is here to take your Mac to the next level. With the Mac Superbundle you can: Run Windows in OS X with Parallels 7, Take Pixel-Perfect Screenshots with Little Snapper, Monitor your Mac at a Glance with iStat Menus 3, Create Powerful HTML5 Designs Easily with Flux 3, Plus Six Other Amazing Apps for Pennies on the Dollar!
We’ve stuffed this package full of awesome-sauce and the savings are oozing out. You’ll get $471 dollars worth of software for only $49! That would be an amazing deal for Parallels 7 alone, but you’ll get so much more.
Want to know about everything you’ll get in the Mac SuperBundle? Head over to Deals.CultofMac for the full scoop and to make your purchase.
A few months ago, Days of Wonder released the $2 iPhone version of their overwhelmingly popular, award-winning board game, Ticket to Ride. Ticket to Ride Pocket amazed everyone by including all the elements of the iPad version in a smaller, tighter, but just as engrossing package — only with one huge hole: While you could play real people around you via a Bluetooth connection, there wasn’t any way to play against people who weren’t in the same room with you. All that changed yesterday, making TTR pocket one of the best board game on the iPhone, right up there with chess and Words with Friends.
Our favorite cloud storage service has a nice little treat for anyone brave enough to beta test their latest app. Right now, Dropbox is offering up to an extra 5G of storage for testing out their new automatic upload feature. For every 500MB of photos and videos you automatically upload, Dropbox will reward you with a 500MB space bonus, up to 5GB. Automatic upload seems to be the primary feature added in this beta build, but here’s what they list as new on their site:
We’ve waited patiently for this little gold nugget of a photo processing app to land at the Mac App Store, ever since developer Nevercenter teased us with CamerBag 2‘s beta a few months back. Wait’s over: It’s here. And today only it’s on sale for $19.
Apple has made another addition to its team this week with a former Microsoft Product Marketing chief, Robin Burrowes, joining the ranks to become the head of App Store Marketing for iTunes Europe. Burrowes was previously part of Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE team, and he’s not the first gaming executive to head for Cupertino as Apple gets serious about battling consoles head on.
Autodesk makes industry-leading software for animators, architects and industrial designers, so maybe the fact their Pixlr-o-matic app is a stunning, gasp-worthy photo-effects tool for the iPhone (and iPad) shouldn’t be surprising; what is a surprise, though, is that it’s free.
Fitness buffs love Runkeeper (and its accompanying iPhone app) for its ability to gather data from a wide variety of cloud-based services and gadgets they might use, so it can be stored and viewed in a central location; we haven’t exactly counted, but it’s a good bet that the all-knowing fitness service can import data from more fitness apps, services and gadgets than any other cloud-based fitness service on the planet. But with the nine more they added today, well, now it’s just getting ridiculous.
If you need information from Wikipedia, you’d best get it very quickly; in just a few hours, at 9 P.M. PST (5:00 UTC for our European readers), a coalition of sites across the web — including Wikipedia’s English site, Boing Boing and Reddit — will go dark for a day, displaying this page instead of their usual home pages.
Steve Wozniak is a man who loves technology. He’s also a man who’s not afraid to tell it how it is. You’d expect a guy who co-founded Apple to be incessantly praising it while dismissing any advantages the competition may wield. Instead, he’s an open-minded guy who enjoys a variety of tech products, including Android. In fact, in an interview with the Daily Beast, Woz had much praise for the mobile OS that Steve Jobs was hellbent on destroying.
The idea behind the Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile ($99) is that the quality of your sleep affects your health in a bigger way than we generally recognize, and that measuring the amount of time we sleep and its quality — then quantifying that sleep with a number on a 100-point scale — will give us the information we need to improve our sleep, and ultimately our health.
A large proportion of iPhone 4S adopters have been hit by an issue on the new device that randomly mutes their audio when they make a call. Their recipient appears to pickup — or the call goes to voicemail — but they do not hear anything.
If you’re one of these users and you’re hoping for a fix in Apple’s upcoming iOS 5.1 software update, then you may be disappointed. According to developers already testing the release, it does not address this particular issue.
There’s nothing else quite like the highly sophisticated Real Racing 2 HD on iOS. It’s the platform’s best racing simulator, is one of the best games available for the iPad and may even be one of the most fun racing games on any platform (using the iPad as a steering wheel trumps a console controller any day).
Do you just like using the well-designed Apple keyboard with your work PC? If so, you know that there are inevitably some drawbacks to using Apple’s own QWERTYUIOP bar with Windows, mainly in the fact that many keys — such a print screen, volume control, eject and more — don’t work outside of OS X.
As is often the case, if you want to use your Apple keyboard as Steve intended within the Windows environment, there’s an app for that. It’s called Apple Keyboard Helper, and it’s a free download. Here’s what it does.
Users who are still running the iOS 3.1.3 software on their iPhones and iPod touches are reporting that a recent App Store update has blocked them from downloading new apps directly to their devices. The update was issued on December 16, and users have been unable to download new apps since, though they can still download updates to existing apps.
Do you really need to spend a lot of money to get grade-A photo-editing tricks? Apparently not. With Snapheal ($20), developer MacPhun has taken arguably the coolest Photoshop feature in recent years, made it dead-easy to use and packaged it with all the basic photo-editing tools you’ll need — and more. And all for a fraction of what it should cost.
Mariner Software just updated veteran writing/blogging app MacJournal to version 6, with a double helping of new features thrown in.
Shared Paper is a lovely iPad app for making and sharing presentations on a huge scrollable canvas.
It’s here! After long years of waiting, you can finally – finally – get your hands on a copy of TextMate 2.
Children and Apple stuff mix pretty well — iDevices cap the top three slots on kids’ wishlists, right? So it’s a good bet that there’ll be a bunch of Apple stuff underneath the trees or the Menorah this year. We’ve put together a short list of icing-on-the-cake type gifts — or great follow-ups if you got ’em iDevices last year.
We’ve had some great response to the Winter 2011 Mac Phenom Bundle over the past week. We’re really happy to see so many readers enjoying the apps. As a reminder to all those who have been debating whether or not to purchase the bundle, the deal ends tonight at 11PM PST, so get it while you can!
The Holiday season is here, and you can get all your holiday shopping done while sitting in your pajamas sippin’ eggnog in front of your computer screen. With the Winter 2011 Phenom Bundle you can either gift individual apps from your own bundle, or better yet, get the entire lineup for your friends and family! We’re really excited to be able to bring you 11 amazing apps for a tasty price of $50. Individually these little gems would cost a total of $486, but we’ve been able to negotiate a great deal for you just in time for the holidays.
This great bundle of Mac OS X apps includes:
Nisus Writer Pro
Motion Composer
Bellhop
PhotoStyler
Tidy Up!
MacGourmet Deluxe
Rubbernet
Boom
AppDelete
Remote Buddy
MacScan
Everyone knows that Apple creates products that are great for creating. But part of what makes that statement true is the deep selection of third-party gadgets that make the most of artistic impulse. We’ve painted this next section, Gifts for the Imagination, with examples that’ll help nourish the next Pissarro, Satriani or Cartier-Bresson.